Scrabulous comes back to life as Wordscraper

The saga over the Facebook gaming application Scrabulous continues. The developers of the popular game — who turned off the application Tuesday after a lawsuit from Scrabble maker Hasbro — have launched a redesigned version of the game dubbed Wordscaper.

News.com reports: “The reason for Scrabulous’ extreme makeover has its roots in some pretty gray legal matters: the real problem wasn’t that it ripped off Scrabble, but that it ripped off Scrabble so blatantly. The colors of the board were the same, the list of rules led to a Wikipedia entry for Scrabble rules, and the two names were similar enough for Hasbro to cry foul.”

Once all the legal troubles clear up, maybe RealNetworks will buy Scrabulous — I mean Wordscraper — after all. Here’s what RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser had to say about a possible purchase at a conference last week.

“If we were able to put together the layer cake where everybody was happy — and there were a lot of everybody’s in this case — sure it would have been great to buy Scrabulous. But at the same time if you can’t get everybody aligned on a philosophy on how to work these things out, it would have been putting the cart before the horse.”